New faces at the NHL negotiating table

A pivotal week is under way in the NHL lockout, with December here, the sides still in stalled negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement and the 2012-13 season in danger of cancellation.

The league and the players union will try a new tack in the next owners-players meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, with a different set of owners representing the NHL, and with Gary Bettman, the league's commissioner, and Donald Fehr, the union's executive director, absent from the room.

The special negotiating session will be followed Wednesday by an NHL Board of Governors meeting that will serve as a referendum on whether to continue holding a hard line against the players in the face of mounting financial losses and the possible loss of the season.

No matter what the outcome of those first two meetings, more games are expected to be canceled Thursday or Friday, adding to the 34 percent of the season wiped out by the lockout.

The new faces on the owners' side Tuesday will be Mark Chipman of the Winnipeg Jets, Larry Tanenbaum of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Ronald Burkle of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Jeff Vinik of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Two holdovers from the owners' regular negotiating committee will also be present: Jeremy Jacobs of the Boston Bruins and N. Murray Edwards of the Calgary Flames.

Jacobs, also the chairman of the Board of Governors, is considered the hardest of the hard-line owners and, alongside Bettman, the architect of the league's three lockouts in the Bettman era: 1994-95, 2004-5 and 2012.

"If it's Jeremy Jacobs in there spewing his stuff, I don't think it's going to move this process forward," Winnipeg forward Andrew Ladd said last weekend, distilling the players' adverse view of Jacobs.

Six players are slated to be on the union side of the table, although the NHL Players' Association has yet to announce them. Steve Fehr, the union's special counsel, and Bill Daly, the NHL deputy commissioner, will also attend.

But Bettman and Donald Fehr will not. Their absence from the meeting was proposed by the league after two days of federal mediation went nowhere last week.

The meeting was agreed to Sunday by the union, which does not consider Tuesday's meeting a formal negotiating session.

Also not present Tuesday on the owners' side: the Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis and Craig Leipold, owner of the Minnesota Wild.

Leipold is the object of resentment among some players for having signed Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to 13-year, $98 million contracts in July, then demanding a rollback on those contracts and limits to future deals as part of the league's negotiating committee.

Leipold and the free-agent defenseman Chris Campoli got into a brief heated exchange during a negotiating session last month.

Burkle, Tanenbaum and Chipman are believed to be less hard line than other NHL owners.

The Penguins, with Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and a new arena, thrived under the expired collective bargaining agreement. Burkle and his co-owner, Mario Lemieux, are believed to be less inclined to want a radical rollback in players' salaries and contract rights than other owners.

Tanenbaum's Maple Leafs are the league's richest club and are losing the biggest revenue stream to the lockout, estimated at $200 million a year. Last December rival communications giants Bell Canada and Rogers Communications joined forces to buy a $1.3 billion stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. Those corporations are presumed to want games to resume and the revenue stream to start flowing again.

Chipman's Jets are an NHL success story, having become very profitable after Chipman and David Thomson bought the club and relocated it from Atlanta in 2011. The Jets are presumed to be eager for a return to play, but Chipman and Winnipeg are also beholden to Bettman, who facilitated the rapid relocation a year and a half ago.

Vinik's views are less clear. He bought the Lightning during the 2009-10 season and subsequently brought in a new management team, including Steve Yzerman as general manager, to revamp the club and the arena. But it continues to lose money, and Vinik may be willing to hold a hard line until the owners wring more concessions from the players.

Left off the six-owner negotiating team was the Rangers owner James L. Dolan, after reports over the weekend that Dolan wanted to take part. That might reflect Dolan's continuing isolation from NHL leadership after his failed call to oust Bettman in 2008 and a related failed lawsuit against the league over Internet rights.

But estimations of where each owner stands are largely a matter of surmise.

Owners have maintained a league-mandated silence during the lockout, with only Bettman and Daly authorized to speak for management. The league can impose fines of up to $1 million for unauthorized statements by owners or club employees.

Under these rules, owners and club officials have said only a handful of things publicly since the lockout began on Sept. 16.

Last week Chipman issued a statement denying a report that a Jets official was silenced by Jacobs during a recent Board of Governors meeting. In his NHL-approved statement, Chipman called the report "completely false."

Last month the Flyers owner Ed Snider issued a statement denying a report that he had "soured" on the league's hard-line stance and was no longer a Bettman supporter. In his league-approved statement, Snider called the report "absolutely erroneous."

A handful of other innocuous quotations from owners and officials expressing desire for a quick end to the lockout and a return to hockey have passed without incident. But the league did issue private warnings after such statements in at least a couple of instances, to the Sabres owner Terry Pegula and the Rangers' Dolan.

The only fine for speaking out of turn was imposed on the Detroit Red Wings in September after Jim Devellano, a senior vice president, gave an extensive interview to a British Columbia newspaper in which he likened the players to cattle.

"The owners own the ranch and allow the players to eat there," Devellano said.

Two days after the interview was published, the NHL fined the Red Wings $250,000.